Continuance

I'm working from home today as I'm still having serious energy issues if I sat upright. It's going well - I can concentrate so much better here at home than in the noisy environment at work.

While prepping for lunch, my thoughts turned to one of the key factors of my childhood, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, my first true computer.

I spent so much time playing games on that machine that I can reliably say that I wasted practically years on it. On the other hand, I also did a lot of coding on it and if I hadn't had my good old Speccy, I'd not be the technophile I am today.

I downloaded an emulator and had an amusing time looking over some old favourites. In particular, I remember working at a computer store when I was younger and having to go to a tradeshow. Tradeshows are very noisy, as anyone who's ever been to one will attest to and I remember loading the demo Speccy with Equinox, which had a particularly catchy title tune...and guarding the Speccy from visitors to the booth while it's loading. You see, the Spectrum loaded its programs from tape. Yep, good old cassette tape. And it took forever to load. Sinclair Research decided to make interrupting the load sequence easy, by killing it if you pressed - you guessed it - the space bar (well, key) which also happens to be the largest key on the rubber keyboard. Ah...the joys of tape-based loaders.

As I laid there on my bed listening to the all-too-familiar strains of Equinox, it hit me - I can show my kids the emulator. Heck, I can build the emu on their netbook and set them loose on it. Hundreds of games. Built in BASIC. Colours (it was named the Spectrum for a reason). Okay, just 8 colours but hey, in those days, that was a lot.

Ah...the passing down of tradition from one generation to another.

I wonder if evolution allows for a technophilia selection path?